The Power of Footnotes
1. My idea of the ideal text is still the Talmud. I love the idea of parallel texts, with long, discursive footnotes and marginal commentary, texts commenting on texts. –Noam Chomsky, Mother Jones interview, 1987…
Tag: Noam Chomsky
For So They Treated the Prophets…
Here’s Noam Chomsky–True prophets like Amos — “dissident intellectuals,” in modern terminology — offered both elevated moral lessons, which the people in power weren’t fond of, and geopolitical analyses that usually turned out to be…
Entry: Noam Chomsky
Interesting to find an entry for Noam Chomsky in The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia. The brief mention includes, “He rose to even greater prominence for his lifelong pursuit of radical leftist ideas, some mainstream (he opposed…
Entry: Noam Chomsky
Interesting to find an entry for Noam Chomsky in The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia. The brief mention includes, “He rose to even greater prominence for his lifelong pursuit of radical leftist ideas, some mainstream (he opposed…
Hadji Murat and Noam Chomsky
1. “… when we came to the camp, Hamzat led the khan into the tent. And I stayed with the horses. I was at the foot of the hill when shooting began in Hamzat’s tent….
Morality 101
See, I focus my efforts against the terror and violence of my own state for really two main reasons. First of all, in my case the actions of my state happen to make up the…
Marxism Is Dead; Long Live Marx
Marxism is a curious notion like Freudianism. These are, in my opinion, forms of organized religion, which treat individuals as gods, or maybe idols. In disciplines that have passed beyond the most primitive stage, there…
The Way It Looked Fifty Years Ago
“The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us, who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction — all of…
Thinking for Oneself (and Then There’s the “More Sophisticated”)
The audience I try to reach, and to some limited extent do reach, is a different one: partly, activists of a less doctrinaire sort than the mainstream liberal intelligentsia and sectarian Marxists, partly the kind…
It Can Be So Appealing
Or let me tell you another story I heard about twenty years ago from a black civil rights activist who came up to study at Harvard Law School-it kind of illustrates some of the other…